With a recent study of the Burton consultancy group the authors P. O'Kelly and G. Creese advise their clients how to benefit from the growing controversy over OOXML. Just bow in and don't negotiate a better deal.

The Burton group did an insightful opinion paper as a free giveway to potential clients from large companies. Microsoft bloggers are very happy about it. It is the first time in the debate that they have a well written advocacy paper that promotes their cause and it avoids the whole technical details. I was so impressed to get a human-readable report. Some ODF proponents from ODF Alliance quickly rebutted claims about the alleged shortcomings of ODF. The rebuttal made it the Heise.de top news article. However, the Burton study equally bashes the OOXML format, its standardization process and its propaganda. So why is Microsoft so yip-yip-yahoo happy about it. It must be the core message: OOXML would win. So please, business users adopt MS Office 2007 and consider ODF support as a pure "political statement". Imagine you are negotiating with a vendor and your vendor is pleased with the analysis the consultancy company provides to you. Sounds fishy, right? Hint: Change your consultant.

Sure, we could point out that the independent company also organizes Microsoft sharepoint promotion workshops but who cares. No one believes in independence these days. Its all political and you know it. All promoters and third party implementers of OOXML get their cheques. Hardly any reasonable standard expert believes in the need for similar double standards for Office productivity suites. Why should a national body give a YES without comments when there is no gain over the existing ECMA-376 specification with all its formal technical and editorial shortcomings? Why should you or your standard body serve the cause for free, without any gain whatsoever for your side?

Some time ago a friend showed me a faszinating video about Musk oxes (Ovibos moschatus) who live in the arctic sphere. An ancient species. In mating season the hairy bulls convene for an almost ritual fight in which they bang each others heads, a battle for dominance. The other day hunters invade your homelands or climate changes. The remaining ancient musk oxes continue to bang their heads. So do we.

When you are a large customer you are powerful. Never admit that you still depend on Microsoft products. It is plain stupid. Start your Linux pilot. This annoys your supplier and secures you an appeasement cash-in. Consider alternative products and talk about them. That drives them so crazy that they even draft contracts that prohibit you to talk about alternative software. Eventually you find out that you don't need their products. Better for you. Stick to midterm open standards migration. The IDABC definition gets it best, this is why your supplier invests so much in lobbying against. I am very curious how the Open Specification Promise (OSP) would make OOXML IDABC Open standards compatible. I strongly doubt it is.

ODF is a useful instrument for MS-Office users because Microsoft does not support it yet which is a huge competitive disadvantage. Some Dutch guys told me that the company promised to support it if there is customer demand. Believe it or not, the dominos keep falling down. A field where the Burton study get it wrong. It is targeted at risk-adverse business users, the ones schumpeterian competition wants to eliminate.

What do you do when you are a small player and not powerful enough? Conformism is a suitable strategy. But which party is leading? "If you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes."

Things to consider:

Isn't the whole ISO standardization a follow-up strategy because the governments were able to set modest pressure?

Why were they not required to consider ECMA and ISO standardization of the legacy biff formats(DOC, PPT and XLS)?

Why all the hurry with an immature specification?

Why do they openly attack OpenDocumentFormat (ODF) if its not dangerous?

Did the ISO fast-track standardization process strengthen the OOXML format and its advocacy?

Feel free to think about it. OOXML is part of a negotiation process. Can Microsoft be forced to support ODF? Absolutely. The stronger the rest of the market negotiates the better the results. No one benefits from bowing in.

Some Burton exerpts

Considering the global scrutiny applied to ISO and other standards processes, plus the fact that Microsoft is even more closely scrutinized because of its position as a convicted monopolist, it would be self-defeating for Microsoft to attempt to subvert the standards processes or somehow establish an intellectual property-based advantage for itself in order to thwart other vendors seeking to exploit OOXML.

So why not bet on self-defeat?

Realistically, it's also extremely unlikely another vendor will attempt to exploit OOXML in order to produce a comprehensively competitive alternative to Microsoft Office, given the considerable resources that would be required to do so and the economies of scale that would need to be achieved in order to make the endeavor sustainably profitable.

If so, than the format does not qualify as an international ISO standard, and should be challenged e.g. via the WTO TBT road.

Comparing the XML examples in Figures 9 (OOXML) and 12 (ODF), it's clear that the OOXML markup is morecryptic and harder to understand, a subject of extensive criticism from the ODF community. Microsoft has stated it was a deliberate choice to help reduce the size of OOXML files, but as a general rule, an ODF version of a document is slightly smaller than its OOXML counterpart.

as a general rule, an ODF version of a document is slightly smaller than its OOXML counterpart

This strikes me as a particularly interesting tidbit of information. While the actual claim that MS makes is that OOXML is faster to parse, this makes me want that verified even more. I doubt that OOXML is any faster in real world scenarios, and I doubt that MS has made any actual comparisons. After all, they don't have an ODF parser for Office, do they?